Almost ten years to the day since The Neon Demon’s premiere, Nicolas Winding Refn returns to Cannes with Her Private Hell—a film wherein the internet’s it girl du jour Sophie Thatcher is captured quite beautifully through the Danish filmmaker’s heightened, neo-noir style. With the film’s wafer-thin plot and essentially non-existent characters, however, the one-time enfant terrible’s first feature in a decade has little to defend itself against the creeping sense of perfume-advert vapidity—or, worse still, AI slop. The extent to which you agree with that will come down to each viewer’s taste and sensibilities, of course, but I must say that after ten years away from the world’s biggest screens, I’d been hoping for a little more.
It’s curious to think about the Danish director in the context of AI imagery—a whole subset of which owes a great deal to the role he played in repopularizing neo-noir at the start of the 2010s, just as Instagram and Pinterest were being launched. That run of work, from 2011’s Drive through The Neon Demon in 2016, then inspired its own subgenre of filmmaking that probably peaked in 2017 with the full-circle release of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Whether Her Private Hell distinguishes itself so thoroughly as, for example, Wes Anderson has done against the claims that an AI model can do it just as well, I’m not so sure. The movie’s humanity comes across in the living and (heavily) breathing performances, but a lack of convincing dialogue and anything close to a real location leaves it feeling awfully flat and unspecific.
As far as the story is concerned: Thatcher stars as Elle, the daughter of a wealthy filmmaker named Johnny Thunders (MI: 2’s Dougray Scott, digging in with plenty relish) who appears to have a taste for women her age and has even gone so far as to marry her best friend, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu). At the beginning, a doe-eyed ingenue named Hunter (Kristine Froseth) enters the fray, a bit like Elle Fanning did into the hellish fashion world of Neon Demon, but Refn chooses to steer from the filmmaking side of the story as soon as an early, Barbarella-style shoot happens. This is, apparently, because a creature known as Leather Man has descended on the shadowy city where the movie takes place, and he too appears to be targeting young women, creeping up from behind to rip their chests open. At this point, an American G.I. (Charles Melton) arrives and begins hunting down Yakuza-style mob guys in the director’s characteristically gruesome fashion. I could go on; you get the gist.
It seems inevitable that Thatcher, perhaps the most Refn-coded actress of her generation, would end up starring. Since breaking out on Yellowjackets, the Chicago native has cultivated a convincing image of effortless detachment and a look that splits the difference between Joan Jett and Lana Del Ray—in other words, she fits the director’s style to the bone. In Hell, Thatcher never looks less than great, even when smoking a cig—a skill that actors of her generation have struggled to master. When Melton arrives, resembling Elvis in G.I. Blues—albeit boasting a knuckleduster and 0% body fat—you start anticipating the moment their paths will cross, yet Refn decides to take his film elsewhere. In its stead, we get Hell‘s only sex scene (with the no-less-dreamy Diego Calva), but his character isn’t given the space to rise above aesthetic purposes, and their climactic coupling fails to raise a pulse.
If any term came to mind during the press screening, it was probably “pretentious,” a word people don’t like to use anymore. When a character invitingly informs the viewer that they’re about to enter a famously lurid party that only reveals a rather empty night club of Greek busts and blue / magenta strobe lighting, however, there’s little else for the eyes to do than roll. Brian De Palma’s legendary composer, Pino Donaggio, provides what could be, at 84 years of age, his final score, and it’s a doozy. But even considering the last few years of Refn’s life—during which he had a serious brush with death during heart surgery—Her Private Hell is nobody’s idea of a grand return. In the press notes, he stated that this experience has inspired a new rush of creativity. Bring it on.
Her Private Hell premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by NEON on July 24.